BASF Plant Science—a BASF group company—is one of the world's leading providers of innovative plant biotechnology solutions for agriculture. It has developed an unparalleled gene discovery platform focusing on yield and quality traits in crops such as corn, soybean, and rice. The global plant biotechnology market segment is highly competitive, and BASF Plant Science relies on the output of its research and development (R&D) to ensure its offering remains up-to-date. With this in mind, it recently updated the computing resources available to its researchers with the Intel Xeon processor E5 and Intel Xeon processor E7 family, running on Cisco Unified Computing System* (Cisco UCS*) blade servers. Internal benchmarking tests supported by Intel comparing the time it took different processor configurations to complete basic local alignment search tool (BLAST) commands, indicated that the new processing hardware could perform these processes 1.6 times faster than the previous infrastructure. The new hardware also supports a wider range of applications, helping BASF Plant Science accelerate its research efforts and will eventually reduce time-to-market for new products.